Village of the Future.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 4978, 10 April 1889, Page 2

Village of the Future.

Agriculture is so much in need of aid from those who inhabit the cities that every summer thousands of men leave their slums in the towns and go to the country for the season of crops. The London destitutes go in thousands to Kent and Sussex as haymakers and hoppickors; whole villages jn France abandon their homos and their cottage industries in the summer, and wander to the more fertile parts of the country} and in Russia there is every year an exodus of many hundreds of thousands of men who journey from the north to the southern prairies for harvesting the crops; while many St. Petersburg manufacturers reduce their production in the summer, because the

operatives return to their native villages for (he culture of their allotments. Extensive agriculture cannot be carried on without additional hands in the summer ; but it still more needs a temporary aid for improving the soil, for ten-folding ils productive powers. The scattering of industries over the country —so as to bring the factory amid the fields, and to mate agriculture derive all those profits which it always finds in being combined with industry (see [the Eastern States of America) —and the combination of industrial and agricultural work are surely the next step to ..be made, as soon as a reorganisation of our present condition is possible. That step is imposed by the very necessities of producing for the producers themselves ; it is imposed by the necessity for each healty man and woman to spend a part of his or her life in free work in the free air and it will be rendered more necessary when the great social movements, which have now become unavoidable, come to disturb the present international trade, and compel each nation to revert to her own resources for her own maintenance. —Prince Kraptokin, in the Nineteenth Century .